And the moon was along for the ride.
As an update to my last post :
The City has given us more time (until this Friday, noon) to comment on the new Environmental Impact Statement for the commercial rezone in this valley. On the one hand, this is good, because I have plenty more to say. On the other hand, I’m pretty tired of saying it.
It’s back!!!! No, not the Super Blood Moon Eclipse, the rezone I have been fighting for 5 years!
Yes, The City has published the new “Supplemental” Environmental Impact Statement and the findings are as fake as this photo, but not nearly as well faked, if I do say so myself. This was the photo I had hoped to get, but the haze and the full eclipse made the moon nearly invisible at that point in the sky.
If you are new to the story of the rezone on the property below my house, or need a refresher, here it is:
Church buys oxbow/slough and 43 acres of wetlands in1999. They see the property as perfect for a 500 member church. Over time, the church realizes they are in way over their heads—the project would be far too expensive, besides they only have 40 members. They latch onto the idea they can make a pile of money on the property by getting it rezoned from Limited Open Space to General Commercial and selling it to a big box retailer. For many years they try getting the idea past the Planning Commission without success. This failure is partly because the City’s Comprehensive Plan has the property zoned Limited Open Space for the specific purpose of preventing commercial sprawl into this valley, partly because the property is a mile away from the city’s other commercial districts (already struggling to fill vacant space), and largely because, environmentally, the idea is insane.
By 2010, the Pastor of this church is feeling very frustrated. The pastor’s son, a skilled political consultant, finesses the take over of the City Council and the mayor’s office. The new team ignores the planning commission and pushes forward with the rezone and its enabling comprehensive plan amendment. To proceed, they first need an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The City staff is put to the task. It becomes clear that any City staff members who voice concerns about the rezone will not have their jobs long.
A few of my neighbors and I appeal the resulting EIS. The Hearings Examiner agrees with us and invalidates the Comp Plan and rezone. A month later, the mayor fires the Hearings Examiner. This was 2012.
In 2013, An international engineering firm with a “team of experts” takes the job of producing a “real” EIS. They accept a lien on the property as guarantee of payment for their services. The new EIS is over 200 pages—very long on detail, and very short on reality. Pretty much everything in it is outrageously inaccurate, but the most outrageous claim they make is that removing the blackberries on the property will provide 30,000 cubic yards of compensatory flood storage (No, I’m not kidding). They continually insist that their LIDAR-generated TOPO map is far more accurate than the conventional survey map. This is because the LIDAR is interpreting the 8′ high blackberry bushes along the slough as solid ground that can be excavated for flood storage.
We appeal, but the new Hearings Examiner sides with the City. A special session of the City Council is called on December 26, 2013 to approve the rezone so that the mayor can sign it into law before his four years in office are over.
We appeal to the State Growth Management Hearings Board (GMHB). In September of 2014, the GMHB invalidates the comp plan amendment/rezone and sends it back to the City for a re-think. By this time, the City has spent over $250,000 in taxpayer funds on a private party’s rezone attempt.
When it comes time to decide whether to drop the whole thing or try to address the concerns of the GMHB with a new version of the EIS, one council member is absent. The vote is a tie. In this situation, the new mayor who opposes the rezone is allowed a vote. He breaks the tie. The rezone is finally dead……..we thought. After we all leave the council chamber in celebration, one council member invokes Robert’s Rules of Order and announces his intention to bring the decision back at the next council meeting when his compadre would be present. Of course, the vote goes the other way at that following meeting.
So, here we are. On August 28, 2015, the new 200 page “Supplemental” EIS is published and we are given 30 days to respond. The blackberry bushes are no longer playing a role, but the claims in this new EIS are just as staggeringly bizarre. I turned in my 18 page response. The battle goes on.
You can’t always get what you want, but……this is the photo I did get that night—in between writing like mad to meet the next day’s deadline.
Back in 1970, I decided to restore my grandfather’s 1941 Packard. I took it all apart and put many hours of labor into it,………but, ….then I got distracted by some other project that I don’t remember. Whatever that project was, I’m sure I got distracted from it by another, and another, and so on. The Packard became a storage unit for all manner of things in my folks’ garage. There it has sat for the last forty-five years. My sisters are now joining forces in that house and the Packard had to go.
I had originally planned to move it myself, but the logistics began to look more complicated and dicey than I had imagined, so I called Speeds Towing. It wasn’t cheap but it was done in a flash and without sweat or injury to myself or others. The driver, Mike, turned out to be a neighbor, a very nice guy, and the bass player for the unusual and world renown band Sneaking Out. You can check them out here at the Portland Music Awards playing the typewriter and other instruments.
Here is the car, or the largest chunk of it, arriving at its new home in Monroe, WA. It will take me several more trips in my little pickup to get the rest of it up here.
I’m not making any guarantees as to how fast the restoration will proceed…..I still have a lot of distractions :-), but, interestingly, there are a lot more resources now than there were in 1970. I hope to get it back to looking more like it does in the photo below.
I was able to get nine exposures of this Northern Harrier as it flew by at the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge, but nine made for a very wide photo.
Northern Harrier Hawk
“All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.”
? Sean O’Casey 1880-1964
Voussoir Caché
In the audience
I am as cool as Sherlock Holmes
On stage, I sweat
The lights are blinding
Where are my lines?!!
……Your window was open
I looked in
drawn, moth-like, to all the possibilities
of what it is you are about
Yes, though your window was open
wontedly
I discovered only myself
looking out
An entire building abandoned
Yes, it looks like we will be fighting the commercial rezone of the valley below me for a fifth year. 
As I was writing my speech for last night’s Council meeting, I spotted these eagles taking advantage of the windy day. I was hoping it was a good omen. Nope.
At the end of the day, the vote went as expected: 4 to 3 in favor of redoing the Environmental Impact Statement in order to get the needed approval from the Growth Management Board for the rezone. Several of us tried our best to get these four to justify their decision based on the environmental realities of the property or the best interests of the City, but they stuck with simply calling it a property rights issue.
The process will take another nine months to a year to complete. The City will need an extension on the Board’s time-line for compliance. I will petition the board to refuse to grant that extension, but I don’t anticipate having much luck there. Our side has a great deal more experience advocating for this property now, so I am reasonably confident we will prevail once again, but it is such a colossal waste of everybody’s time and taxpayer money.
The church offered to pay the cost of the new Environmental Impact statement so long as the engineering firm that did the last one—which was 95% BS—prepared the new one. We just discovered that this engineering firm has had a lien on the property for the entire cost of their work since the beginning. So they have their own reasons for wanting to continue since they seem to think the property has no value unless rezoned. Even so, the amount the church is willing to shoulder represents only about a third of the cost the city will incur going through the process again. My theory is that someone, most likely the Pastor’s son—a former council member, now political consultant—put the screws to his two political proteges who broke ranks and voted to stop the bleeding at the October 14 council meeting. These two council members and the two who remained true to the cause came to last night’s council meeting united in the suspicion that the large cost estimates they were given earlier were the result of a conspiracy between the new mayor and the planning department staff—a conspiracy intended to bring the issue to an end. The mayor responded that he had been taken aback by the numbers in the estimate himself, and had questioned the staff extensively on their reasoning for those numbers. One of the more perceptive council members pointed out that these four united council members had, earlier in the year, heaped praise on this same planning staff for ushering through the failed EIS, but now when their cost estimates do not support continuing with the rezone effort, the staff’s numbers are suspect. The reality is, as with most government estimates, they are probably low.
As usual, I took up my entire 5 minutes, down to the second. I mostly pointed out that the huge legal costs to the City were the result of their acceptance of the many obvious inaccuracies and deceptions in the first EIS and that it really didn’t seem prudent to give the same firm another go at it. No matter, at the end of the meeting, one of them announced he would move to rescind the October 14 decision at the December 2 council meeting. It looks like I am in for another year of this. The chances this property would or even could be developed commercially seem almost nil, but my experience in this saga tells me that trusting government officials to act in the best interest of the community, in accordance with law, or using common sense is a bad bet.
Cowzer!
Yes, Jan, it was a dutch baby. I often make myself a dutch baby for breakfast. When I pull it out of the oven, I set it on the nearest heat-resistant-trivet-like surface—a burner coil on the stove. On this particular day, about an hour after breakfast—as I was talking on the phone and a little distracted—I decided to heat some water for coffee. Fortunately, I had moved about 15 feet away when from behind me came a gunshot-like bang and shards of glass were everywhere. Oops, wrong burner.
Your mission, friends, should you decide to accept it, is to figure out what the subject of this photograph is and how it came to be. I did add some art filters and distortion to make it less obvious. Here is the riddle that provides the answer:
For me it was just a typical morn
as the babe from the fiery furnace was born.
The crib was hot and ready for rest,
but where in the world could stand such a test?
Lacking for space, it lay down on a burner
and waited in ambush for me, the wrong turner.
The water was cold, though it wanted to boil,
when the beast with a bang sprang from its coil.
Lucky for me, I was just out of its reach,
but for your future well-being, I thee beseech,
if it is fire you need, and proceed with dispatch,
be more than certain you light the right match.
